Has anyone noticed their recently bought drives click every 5+ seconds, and you can't attribute it to the load/unload count? This is a feature of drives called Preventative Wear Leveling, intended to ensure lubrication is constantly distributed
maybe it's wd drives only.thanks for the heads up,will not touch a wd drive then. seahawk 2tb drive here,no clicking,super quiet drive.sitting in the open docking station right behind my monitor as if it wasn't there.
Its all drives, though depending on drive age and vendor the period could be different. a wd black from 2013's stock might do it every 10m, a wd black 2016 might do it every 5 seconds. Seagate Ironwolfs and recent Barracuda's are known to do it as well. It's a bit of a problem that nearly all the worlds known hdd vendors are now part of WD or Seagate :\
I have some old WD laptop drive from 2009 which does this click sound about every 10 minutes. I thought it is problem too, but since performance was fine and no SMART warnings or bad sectors were found, I kept it, glad I did, good to know this is a maintenance feature. HGST is part of them too?
"intended to ensure lubrication is constantly distributed" Every 5 seconds? How quickly does this lubrication dry up?
I started hearing this with my WD Blue drive (bought some years ago) now that I swapped PSU and new one has hybrid fan feature. It's barely audible outside the chassis though. It sounds like a relay clicking. Wasn't too bothered about it as the drive works and is used for backups.
LOL its their most expensive Black and Gold drives that you get it on Seagate Ironwolves and Exo's do it too.
glad I got that steel hawk or sea hawk or something. I went with the lowest dba drive (as specified in the specs sheet) and if I heard some f***ing clicking it'd be going back immediately.
Is there anyway to stop this or shouldn't try do so? My 1TB Toshiba HDD clicks 2-3 times a day. Parks head, then unparks. First you hear a dry sound, like "clogh" (can't really imitate it by typing lol, but it's similar), then I hear "cli-click-click-click", always the same sequence of sounds, never looked at the times it happens, but I think it's always around 11 pm to 2 am, Windows Event Viewer Shows nothing. All s.m.a.r.t tests and benchmarks show no problems, also I play some games on this HDD, RDR2 runs perfectly smooth, no weird issues, For Honor too and MGSV: TPP, so I'd guess it's fine, but who knows? lol
N300 serie from Toshiba is loud and have this feature for sure. I can hear my Synology box from another room, I choose to ignore it now. But first, I was worried.
There have to be materials that are less audible ... at least in niche markets OEMs could offer for those more inclined to pay Agreed, back when I used HDDs still & tried those out - man were they loud.
I'm 6 years with a hybrid psu,and I'll tell you what - I'm not going hybrid again. It's a nice feature for idle,but that fan will have to start when the psu is loaded,sooner or later.And it's gonna go straight to high rpm to cool it down.IMO better use pwm than hybrid. bequiet psus are a great example.